All customer reviews

There are few films that have a sense of the stars aligning at just the moment they are created. Excalibur is one of them. The entire creative team delivered (not too little and not too much). Boorman was already a legend. His cast, with few exceptions, went on to become the movie stars of the next forty years. His source material was extensive (the entire Arthurian cycle, with many variants of stories in multiple languages) and yet he and Rospo Pallenberg were able to take their essence and distill them into a myth no subsequent filmmaker has improved upon. The orchestral music, too, was abundant, drawn from a hit list of classical pieces written over the centuries. Who would imagine Carmina Burana being used in a Hollywood film? It works marvelously. Overall, the movie combines minimalism with conflicted desire and a pictorial beauty that should be studied by anyone who desires to tell stories and everyone who loves a good story well-told. Arrow Video’s 4K HDR restoration of the film brings all of these elements to the forefront. Run, don’t walk, to experience it. You’ll thank them for it.